Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

Nothing.

“Do you still think it’s a good idea to explore that station?” Anlyn asked in Drenard.

“Absolutely,” Edison said, replying in kind. He peered through the canopy at the distant structures hanging in the void. “It would’ve been quite the raid if your cousin had left the way open. There’s nothing here to stop us.”

“I’m actually shocked he let us through at all. But you’re right, this has been anti-climactic.” Anlyn paused and pointed to her screen. “Hey, according to these charts, we’re going to pass near a major jump point on the way. There’s at least a dozen of those route lines converging on a few spots, probably where they directed outbound traffic. You think we should stop and look for any trace signatures?”

“I don’t follow,” Edison said.

“Hyperdrive traces,” Anlyn said. She turned to him, reminded once again that her betrothed was a genius, but he hadn’t been exposed to everything . He just seemed so comfortable with space flight—and technology in general—that she found it easy to forget he’d grown up around none of it.

“When you jump through hyperspace,” she explained, “you leave a signature. They fade over time, but if someone jumped out in the last few days, we could possibly get a general idea of where they went.”

“Fascinating,” Edison said. He leaned over the ship’s computer and typed away. His fingers paused for a split second. “I found a help file on it,” he murmured, then went back to typing furiously.

“Great,” Anlyn said. “That means I’m going to be the expert on the subject for another five whole minutes.”

Edison turned his head and flashed his teeth, which made Anlyn laugh. Edison snorted, which really got her going. The two of them chuckled and wheezed far more than the moment merited—perhaps laughing off some of the day’s anxiety. They laughed with tears in their eyes, with a mind to stop laughing and soon. They laughed with the release of trauma, with the energy that probably should’ve found an escape with a good cry. Most of all, though, they laughed to fake it. They laughed for each other.

It took a moment for Anlyn to compose herself, to keep from carrying on like that forever. She took deep breaths, her heart pounding in her back as the sad echoes of their gaiety filtered aft through the empty ship. She wiped her eyes and looked up at Edison, a somber smile on her face.

“Love, what in the galaxy are we doing here?”

“I’m just following you,” Edison said between pants.

“I’m serious. Are we crazy? Are we wasting our time? What were we thinking?”

Edison finally stopped laughing and gazed out at the wasteland of empty starship stations. He took a deep breath, his chest swelling to fill his tunics. “I’d rather be here than around that table, arguing with your people,” he said. “I was always more up for a good raid than a council meeting.” He turned to Anlyn, his face suddenly full of sadness. “Now my brother, he would’ve preferred the other.”

Anlyn felt a chill at the sudden turn in the conversation. She held her breath, torn between her desire to chase the topic and the fear of scaring Edison away—back to his native English. She toyed with the SADAR using the few buttons she had memorized and watched as he began the trace scan on his own screen. Anlyn took advantage of the distraction:

“You hardly ever mention your brother. Why is that?”

Edison fiddled with the dials along the edge of his SADAR. He cleared his throat, and Anlyn braced for a bout of English techno-babble.

“My brother and I didn’t see the universe the same way,” he said.

Edison fell silent; Anlyn turned to face him. She watched him move to his other display and flip through pages of Bern writing. His head went from side to side as he scanned the lines. She held her breath as he read a few pages and made an adjustment to the scan. Finally, the scan having begun, he turned away and looked out his porthole.

“You don’t have to talk about it—” Anlyn said.

“I killed him,” Edison blurted out.

“Love.” Anlyn reached over and ran her fingers through the fur on his arm. Suddenly, she didn’t want him to talk. She didn’t desire to hear, to know. She felt guilty for ever wanting to drag anything out of him before he was ready. “I didn’t mean to bring that up,” she said. “We don’t have to talk about your home—”

“No.” Edison shook his head. “Before that, before the EMP, my brother and I fought in a bunker. Cole and Molly were there and… and I killed a member of the council with my bare hands. Then I left my brother in there. I left him in that bunker to die, knowing what I was about to do.”

Edison turned and faced Anlyn, tears streaming across his fur.

“I hated him,” he said. “I hated my brother, but exterminating my entire people was easy compared to that—” He stopped, too choked up to continue.

Anlyn reached for him; she wrapped both arms around his head and cooed softly. In the back of her neck, her heart stabbed with pain, hurting at having brought the subject up. Or maybe—at hearing him say the same things in her own language that she’d been used to puzzling through in his rigid English.

“I love you,” she said in the common, Drenard form.

“And I you,” Edison replied.

So they held each other, floating beyond the Great Rift on the Bern side of the universe, Edison with his head snuggled against her tunics, Anlyn with her cheek resting on his fur. They stayed like that for several minutes, precisely the length of time it took the Bern computer to crunch the hyperspace signatures.

And thereby destroy the mood.

Walter slapped his flightsuit, thumping the Wadi on its head, but the stupid thing just continued to squirm in his pocket. He reached the end of the alley and rounded the corner, having decided to try the building with the thick door first, mostly to stick to the same order as before. Unlike other Palans, he liked order.

As he reached the wooden sidewalk, he merged with a weaving stream of boisterous and drunk nighttime people. He stuck close to the side of the building, wincing at the sound of the traffic blaring in the street.

Just ahead, he spotted a wallet bulging in a back pocket, the badge of a tourist. He scooted forward, drying his hands on his flightsuit, before he remembered what he was supposed to be doing:

He was looking for Molly.

He shook his head, turned, and surveyed the building next to him.

It was lit up inside, but he didn’t see an open or closed sign. He cupped his hands around his face and leaned close, trying to look past the glare of light bouncing back and forth between the glass and his face. The interior seemed shallow, just a bit of standing room and a tall counter that ran the width of the building. Two large Humans worked behind the counter moving boxes and doing boring, officey stuff.

Walter stepped back to look for a sign on the building. The only thing he found was a single line etched into the large pane of glass:

That narrowed it down. Walter knew how Molly felt about politics, no way would she have followed Cat in there. Besides, hadn’t that ticket guy said something about a pub?

He turned and squeezed through the crowd, passing the dark alley to see what the other building was. The first thing he noticed was all the neon lights in the windows, the glowing tubes bent into the shapes of frothy mugs and gigantic bottles. Definitely a pub.

A cluster of figures stumbled out the front door—Humans and otherwise—somehow staying upright by clinging to their fellow drunks. Walter frowned at them. He waited for the group to pass before ducking through the entrance and into a small foyer, where he found a second set of double-doors. These were slathered with posters for upcoming events and hand-scrawled pages put up by people selling things. A half-dozen flash drives dangled from the ends of the latter, no doubt loaded with product pictures and info. Walter considered stealing a few—he knew how to wipe and unlock them for general use—then remembered he had an entire sock drawer full of them on Parsona .